evelyn_b

Where, though? It's a good question.

What I've Finished Reading

About three-fourths of the way through A Double Life, a wonderful thing happens. With a completely straight face, the author J. Michael Lennon appears at a party, in the third person, as "J. Michael Lennon, a young professor at the University of Illinois." Maybe it's not that wonderful, but I laughed and laughed. This shout-out to Mailer's "third-person personal" is all the funnier for being apparently egoless. Lennon appears a few times throughout the rest of the book, with no attention called to the fact that he is The Author of the Book You Hold In Your Hands, Dear Reader.

I enjoyed it a lot, though my fondness for Mailer is pretty abstract. Eventually I'll read his novels about Jesus and Hitler, though probably not Harlot's Ghost (the 1,100-page CIA novel that ends with the words TO BE CONTINUED). I followed with detached amusement his not-very-deft attempts to feud with Michiko Kakutani and be a Hollywood Intellectual. I didn't find his claims to totally genuinely 100% love all women as convincing as Balzac's. There is one really sad and nerve-wracking story in here, and that's the year Mailer tries to engineer a writing and party-going career for his paroled prison correspondent, Jack Abbot.

Mailer on Mailer in The Spooky Art:

Writers aren't taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven't written the books that should have been written. We've spent too much time exploring ourselves. We haven't done the imaginative work that could have helped define America, and as a result, our average citizen does not grow in self-understanding. We just expand all over the place, and this spread is about as attractive as collapsed and flabby dough on a stainless steel table.

You can always count on Mailer to give too much credit to himself even when he's trying to be self-critical.

What I'm Reading Now

If I'd picked up To Shape the Dark at a bookstore or library instead of ordering it, I might have balked at its multiple fancy fonts and slightly irritating introduction and put it straight back on the shelf. I would have missed out - not necessarily on a masterpiece, but on a thoroughly enjoyable anthology of sci-fi short stories about scientists. Editor Athena Andreadis congratulates her authors on having avoided the "as you know, Bob" style of writing, but they mostly haven't at all. I'm surprised at how soothing I find these fresh buckets of exposition being dumped over me one after another.

Favorite story so far: "Fieldwork" by Shariann Lewitt, about a geologist whose grandmother died trying to colonize Europa. That's the other, more obviously soothing thing about sci-fi: the illusion of a future. It's terribly cozy to think anyone could have a grandmother who colonized Europa.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Woman in the Water, a Most Comfortable Man in London prequel about A Deadly Serial Killer, arrived yesterday. I've been sort of sighing resignedly in its direction.

What I've Finished Reading

Unfinished Portrait is the second murder-free novel published by Christie under the pen name Mary Westmacott, and it's much better than Giant's Bread. Maybe it's just that the weaknesses don't show as much, since Unfinished Portrait is the story of a hapless young twentieth-century housewife/aspiring writer rather than that of a hapless young musical genius with amnesia. The melodrama hits closer to home. In fact, all signs point to this being a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Self-Saboteur. The emotional, imaginative Celia throws over a handful of admirers to marry a golf-minded nonentity who gives her a daughter she can't understand; the nonentity leaves her for another woman and gets huffy when she expects him to handle the divorce business himself (at the time, divorce required proof of infidelity, and he was too chivalrous to "put Marjorie through it"). Celia is just about to throw herself off a cliff when she meets The Narrator of this Book, a former portrait painter who can no longer paint (because of The War) but who is so touched by her story that he wrote this book, an unfinished portrait in words. If anyone I didn't already know was Agatha Christie had tried to pull the bit of Significant Imagery she does with the painter's hands, I think I would have cringed hard enough to sprain something, but Christie is cringe-proof and always will be.

What I'm Reading Now

Women Sleuths is a Mount TBR selection, one of the books I took home before the used bookstore shut down and haven't opened since. It's a Reader's Digest anthology of four novellas, beginning with The Toys of Death by notable Golden Age of Murder weirdos Margaret and G. D. H. Cole, a Fabian couple who co-wrote 35 mystery novels. The copyright page of Women Sleuths claims that The Toys of Death was published in 1939; Wikipedia says 1948. I'm interested to read a socialist murder mystery from the Golden Age milieu. So far, there are no very noticeable differences. A house party has been planned, and the Marpleish mother of a well-known detective has just embarrassed the pompous host by accidentally correcting the geography in his fanciful story about Catalonia. Now she's in the garden, making unflattering observations about the guests. What could be better?

What I Plan to Read Next

Next in Christie is Death in the Air, a novel involving both Hercule Poirot and the exciting new world of (getting murdered on) airplanes!

What I've Finished Reading

The Maias isn't shy about being a story made of words, or a satire of Lisbon literary layabouts. The characters – at least the male characters – are bright but not deep, and the female characters are less bright and less deep. It may also be the least gothic incest story of the nineteenth century. We have four hundred-odd pages of bubbly club talk and overeducated emotion while the incest scenario gets set up (Maria and Carlos were raised separately; Carlos thinks his sister is dead and Maria never knew that she had a brother; they meet and are amazed by how well they understand each other! They even have the same middle name, what a cute coincidence! It must be destiny!) When Ega learns the horrible truth about his friend Carlos' mistress (entirely by accident; a friend of the family who knows Maria but hasn't seen Carlos in many years notices them walking together an remarks on it in all innocence) he agonizes over whether to tell his friend, tries to burden the family steward with the information, and finally breaks the news. Carlos is horrified for about fifty pages before he breaks it off with Maria and they go their separate ways. He weeps with bitterness, and the curse of the Maias is acknowledged.

Then, in the final fifty pages of the novel, the world slides back into alignment. A decade passes, and Ega and Carlos are back at the Grémio, gossiping and self-deprecating as if nothing had happened. The horror has lasted a few months at most; the long business of wasting one’s life extends beyond it into the future. Maria has made a perfectly respectable and boring marriage; Carlos has gone back to his relatively harmless wastrel existence, Ega still hasn’t finished that atom book and isn’t going to, but he’s definitely going to buy some clothes and complain that he spends too much on clothes. So the world keeps turning under the cursed and the charmed alike. I’m not completely sure what to make of this, but I think I like it.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't love The Ladies of Missalonghi at all. I disliked it so much that I felt bad about it and went back to try to find some things that I liked. I did find some - the history of the town of Byron (named after the first poet its founder could make heads or tails of), the description of Missy's medical examination, the line drawings) - but eventually I gave up and gave in to my dislike. ( You can read about it here if you want to )

Maybe The Mysterious John Smith's misogyny is supposed to make him a more "realistic" character than The Blue Castle's Barney Snaith, whose only major flaws are an embarrassing writing style and a tragic inability to speak in complete sentences. But given that T.M.J.S. is also a rich mastermind who rolls into town and buys a valley just in time to be tricked into a wish-fulfillment marriage by Missy and [SPOILER! the self-hating ghost of his dead wife!!] this superficial nod toward realism seems neither necessary nor sufficient. Besides which, he's no fun. I don't at all mind reading about fictional misogynists if they are in a book about asshole artists or how much being in the army sucks, but I don't like them in my rom-coms. No snappy pillow talk about how your first wife killed herself just to ruin your life, please! And because I already had it in my mind that this book was going to be similar to The Blue Castle, I wasn't able to relax and enjoy my dislike of T. M. John Smith as I might in any number of other books. I kept waiting for the story either to abandon the template or do a better job of following it. Which is, again, totally unfair to poor Colleen McCullough, who was presumably just trying to write a book like anyone else.

I don't know. This book got me thinking about romantic comedies: how pretty much all my life I've been convinced that I love them, because I love them in theory and there are a few that are my favorites, but if you pick a rom-com at random and show it to me, I'm overwhelmingly more likely to hate it than not. Why I should have such an easily outraged Rom-Com Ideal when I have no problem enjoying mediocre sci-fi and bad murder mysteries is not clear to me.


I was disappointed in myself for not being able to enjoy this book on its own merits (or if not "enjoy," at least separate it from The Blue Castle enough so that I feel like I'm being fair), but I'm also not convinced that it's worth the effort to try again. Oh, well! Better luck next time, Australia.

What I'm Reading Now

I've started The Complete Works of Hadewijch, a present from several years ago, but I don't expect to get through it very quickly. Hadewijch is a thirteenth-century mystic whose works are letters exhorting friends to live in Christ, and poems about personal revelations - all well out of my comfort zone.

Also started: Chicks in Chainmail, a very 90s, very tongue-in-cheek comedy-fantasy anthology with a "warrior women" theme. There is a silly story about a man who dresses as a woman in order to be allowed to fight, and a silly story about the unforeseen consequences of a tax on metal bras. There is an extremely silly story about Hillary Clinton in Valhalla that made me so sad I couldn't follow what was happening, through no fault of 1994.

What I Plan to Read Next

Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary, probably some other things.